Sadly, Anglo-Irish novelist Charles Lever is remembered today as the
cause of Charles Dickens's prematurely publishing Great Expectations
in All the Year Round because Lever's A Day's Ride was driving
down sales of Dickens's weekly journal and only a serial by Dickens himself
could salvage the situation. In fact, as Buchanan-Brown notes,

Charles Lever was an exceedingly prolific writer who enjoyed
a wide popularity in his own day, the pink covers opf the monthly parts of
his novels rivaling the yellows of Thackeray and the greens of Dickens. He
was an Irishman who wrote about his countrymen, and his readers thoroughly
relished the wealth of incident with which his books were packed and the
inexhaustible fund of stories with which they were filled. [p.
12]

The Irish-born Lever (1806-72) was raised in Dublin by English parents.
After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1827, he went to Göttingen
to study medicine; his popular novel,Charles O'Malley is based on his
own college days in Ireland. Arthur O'Leary (1844) and Con
Cregan (1849) reflect some of Lever's own adventures in the Canadian
backwoods in 1829. Lever's first few novels appeared in installments in the
Dublin University Magazine, for which he later served as editor (1842
to 1845), the journal's annual stipend being £1,250. Qualifying as a
physician in 1831, and after working in various Irish county towns, Lever
took up practice in the Northern Ireland seaside resort of Portstewart,
where he displayed remarkable courage and skill in putting down a cholera
epidemic in 1832. After five years of marriage, however, Lever needed a
greater income than the little practice could provide, and so, in 1837, he
took up the post of physician to the British ambassador in Brussels. Before
moving to Belgium, he had started his first novel, Harry Lorrequer,
which like so many of the novels to follow was illustrated by the
incomparable London artist Hablot Knight Brown, the "Phiz" of Dickens fame.
Between 1839 and 1865, Browne etched almost 500 plates for fifteen Lever
novels, as well as drawing numerous vignettes on wood-blocks, his work for
Harry Lorrequer being among his best for Lever.

The difficulties of communicating at a distance are
underlined by the fact that not even the diplomatic bag, which Lever as
physician to the British Ambassador used to send copy of his publisher, was
safe. In January/February 1839 the last instalment of Harry Lorrequer
went astray, with the result, as Lever wrote to M'Glashan [his Dublin
publisher] on 16 February, that 'The scenes for illustration are not so
good, of course, in the concluding No.' [Buchanan-Brown 18]

Despite these early set-backs, by the early 1840s Lever had achieved
great popularity in England because the early Victorian reading-public was
eager to be entertained by his rollicking narratives. Notes S. P. Haddelsey,
"he also enjoyed an abundance of laudatory critical notices which compared
him favourably with his chief rival, Charles Dickens" ("The Lost Victorian,"
p. 1). Determining to abandon medicine for journalism, Lever returned to
Dublin in 1843 as editor of The Dublin University Magazine, in which
he published the first in the series Our Mess, Jack Hinton The
Guardsman. In 1845, he went to Brussels, Bonn, and Karlsruhe, where he
published The Knight of Gwynne (1847, but begun in 1845, before Lever
resigned his editorship), and to the Tyrol, Como, and Florence in 1848; here
he wrote the last of his rollicking, relatively unstructured novels,
Roland Cashel (1850).

A prolific writer much influenced in his early years by Maria
Edgeworth and Sir Walter
Scott, Lever produced thirty novels and five volumes of short
stories and essays; he is best remembered for his farcical, lighthearted
picaresque novels of Irish military life, notably Charles
O'Malley (1841), Jack Hinton (1843),
and Tom Burke (1844). These early novels also
reveal the marked influence of sporting and military novelist William
Hamilton Maxwell, a Peninsular Campaign and Waterloo veteran with whom
Lever became friends while fighting a cholera outbreak in County Clare,
Ireland. Lever had established himself as a popular novelist of the third rank
with his Confessions of Harry Lorrequer,
which had run
serially in the Dublin University Magazine in 1839.
After 1845, as Lever's popularity began to decline, his work became more
serious in tone and more carefully constructed. The turning point in his
fortunes may well have been as early as William Carleton's vicious attack in
The Nation (October 1843) on Lever's novels for
fostering through caricature rather than realistic character study
common English misconceptions about Irish "quaintness." In this new,
more serious style (influenced by French novelist Honoré de
Balzac) he wrote The Daltons (1852) and the
Fortunes of Glencore (1857).

Clearly by 1860 Lever's popularity had shrunk considerably, despite the fact
that he was moving out of the "horse-racious and pugnacious" historical
narrative into more challenging topics, such as the psychology of an unhappy
marriage in Davenport Dunn (1859), written after he
was appointed to the British consulate in Spezia, Italy, and was spending much
of his time in Florence. Although the serial version of the novel first
appeared in the fall of 1860, just after Wilkie Collins's sensational
The Woman in White concluded its serial run
in All the year Round and Harper's Weekly in the United States, Lever's
A Day's Ride did not appear in volume form
under the Chapman and Hall imprint until 1864. In fact, its
publication caused sales of the Dickens weekly to plummet, and Dickens
felt compelled to intervene after the appearance of the fifteenth
chapter of the Lever novel by publishing Great
Expectations, also narrated in the first person.

Reading this
chapter in the November number of Harper's,
one can easily understand how Lever had lost his grip on the popular
pulse. The passage illustrated in "'No More Tea — None!' Cried I," by
the Harper's house artist is this:

"No more tea — none!" cried I, with an energy that nearly
made the footman let the tray fall, and so far startled the old lady that she
dropped her knitting with a faint cry. As for his excellency, he had covered
his face with the Globe, and I believe was fast
asleep. [Ch. 15, p. 701]

The scene is the drawing-room of the elderly aristocrat (left) in the German
spa town of Kalbbratenstadt, the narrator being the novel's protagonist, the
Anglo-Irish Algernon Sydney Potts, like Charles Lever himself a former Trinity
College, Dublin, student roaming the Continent, just as Lever did in his
youth.

His next major novel, Barrington (1862-63) Lever
wrote at Spezia, where he had been British vice-consul since 1858. He was in
fact able to transmit his drafts to his publisher, London's Chapman and Hall,
through diplomatic pouches. Subsequently he produced Luttrel
of Arran (1865), three other novels, and some racy essays for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine under the nom de
plume "Cornelius O'Dowd." In 1867 he moved to Trieste to take up the the post of consul. Here, serving at his final diplomatic post, he died in 1872.

Resources

Buchanan-Brown, John. Phiz! The Book
Illustrations of Hablot Knight Browne. London, Newton Abbot, and
Vancouver: David and Charles, 1978.